This invention relates to the Internet, and more particularly, to techniques for creating and viewing material on the World Wide Web (“web”), and to techniques by which multiple individuals can communicate with each other and work collaboratively on content and materials.
The World Wide Web has made the Internet accessible to a broad range of people. One can search the web and view large amounts of material using a web browser. Recent improvements have made it easier for individuals to contribute their own ideas and creative content via the web. However, there is no satisfactory framework within the web to assist and enable a group of people who may be physically remote from each other, to talk to each other, work together, discuss ideas, create, view, enhance, modify, alter, comment on, and create multiple alternative versions of new material while recording their interactions and contributions in such a way that participants may be automatically identified and rewarded for their efforts, the deliberations of the group preserved and reviewed, and the sequence of interactions reproduced. As a result, many people who have access to the web do not use it in their collaborative efforts.
Furthermore, there is no satisfactory framework within the web to support the definition of pre-defined roles and responsibilities for group members, by which groups organize their activities, nor any satisfactory framework within the Web either to assist participants in understanding, reviewing, accepting, or performing those roles, or to implement systems or methods by which those roles may be objectively specified and carried out automatically or semi-automatically by intelligent artificial agents.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to facilitate the collaboration of multiple participants using a data network such as the web and to record the particulars of their collaboration.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a way in which to facilitate a description, specification, and implementation of roles using a data network such as the web.